Warriors: Extraordinary Tales from the Battlefield

The warrior deserving of the highest praise is he who demonstrates fortitude alone, without the stimulus of comradeship. C.S. Forester wrote a wry little novel entitled Brown on Resolution (1929). It tells the story of a British sailor in the First World War, sole unwounded survivor of a cruiser sunk in the Pacific by a German raider. Brown escapes from captivity with a rifle onto an uninhabited volcanic island, Resolution, where the German ship has put in for repairs. This stolid young man, schooled all his life to a simple concept of duty, knows that the consequence of his actions must be death, but accepts his fate unquestioningly. By harassing the warship from the shore, the lone sailor delays its departure just long enough for a British squadron to engage and sink it with all hands. Brown himself is left mortally wounded, dying alone on his barren rock. For our purposes the key element in Forester’s story is that no one afterwards knows what Brown did, or what his lonely sacrifice achieved. This is a cautionary tale for warriors. The highest form of courage is that of a man who surrenders his life for others without hope of recognition. There have been innumerable such instances throughout history, which by their nature are unknown to us.

By contrast many acts of heroism, some recorded in this book, have been committed in the active hope of advancement or glory. Eager warriors, aspiring heroes, ‘gong chasers’, are generally disliked and mistrusted by those of more commonplace disposition who are obliged to serve with them. Many soldiers display a baleful attitude towards officers who are perceived to be excessively aggressive. ‘It’s all right for him if he wants to win a VC or a Congressional Medal,’ they mutter, ‘but what about us?’ The leaders most readily admired are those who seem committed to do their duty, and also to bring every possible man home alive. The rank and file recoil from officers who seem indifferent to the ‘butcher’s bill’ for their actions. The British colonel most respected by his men in the Falklands campaign, for instance, was by no means the most celebrated. Instead, he was an officer who gained his combat objectives by meticulous planning and diversionary fire, followed up by a dashing flank assault, which achieved success with minimal casualties.

Many celebrated warriors are detested by their comrades. I grew up to idolise Wing-Commander Guy Gibson, who led the 1943 RAF dam-breaking raid on the Ruhr. When researching the bomber offensive for a book, it was a shock for me to discover how much Gibson was disliked by some of those who served under him. ‘He was the sort of little bugger who was always jumping out from behind a hut and telling you your buttons were undone,’ said a gunner in 1978, his resentment undimmed by the passage of thirty-five years. The courage of Lieutenant-Colonel Herbert Jones, commanding 2 Para at Goose Green in the Falklands in May 1982, undoubtedly merited the posthumous Victoria Cross which he received. But more than a few of his comrades in the British army argued that his action in charging personally at the Argentine positions was the negation of the role of a battalion commander, and reflected the fact that he had lost control of the battle. ‘H’ Jones was a fiercely emotional man, fired by a heroic vision which he yearned to fulfil. Many soldiers prefer to be led against the enemy by cooler and more cautious spirits.

A cynic might suggest that some eager warriors are exhibitionists of an extreme kind. A cynic would be right. This does not diminish warriors’ claims upon our regard, but may make us a trifle more sceptical about their motives. Adventure has always been a selfish business,’ author and traveller Peter Fleming once observed. ‘The desire to benefit the community is never [adventurers’] principal motive…They do it because they want to. It suits them; it is their cup of tea.’ The same can be said of eager warriors. A relative of an officer who was responsible for an exceptionally brave action in North Africa in the Second World War once related a story which the family hero possessed enough self-knowledge to tell against himself. Soon after the North African battle took place, the young man went to his colonel and complained that while several fellow officers had received Military Crosses, he himself had got nothing. He felt hard done by. The colonel did not reveal to his young lieutenant that he had been recommended for a Victoria Cross, which was gazetted shortly afterwards. This anecdote emphasises the fact that some men commit brave acts not spontaneously, but in conscious pursuit of recognition.

All armies seek to create an ethos in which such ambitions prosper. Only where at least a handful of soldiers possess either an exceptional sense of duty – like Sergeant-Major Hollis – or an extravagant hunger for fame – like the VC winner mentioned above – can the cause of their nation in arms flourish. A small minority of natural warriors is almost invariably fighting alongside a majority of other soldiers who threaten their army’s prospects of operational success by their eagerness to preserve their own lives. Macaulay’s Horatius demanded:

How can man die better than facing fearful odds,

For the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods?

From a Western commander’s viewpoint, however, a distressingly small number of men share this sanguine view. There is an element of hypocrisy about the manner in which democracies deplore ‘fanatical’ or ‘suicidal’ behaviour in battle by foes such as the wartime Japanese and Germans, and even the modern terrorist. Western armies have awarded their highest decorations, often posthumously, in recognition of behaviour in action which was more likely than not to result in the death of the warrior concerned. It is because it is so difficult to persuade sensible Western soldiers to perform acts likely to cause their own deaths that democratic societies become alarmed when they perceive hostile races capable of more aggressive behaviour than their own. This observation is not intended to applaud fanaticism, merely to recognise our double standard. A modern Islamic suicide bomber might assert that his actions would have won warm Western applause if performed sixty years ago against the Nazi oppressors of Europe. A host of Allied medal citations in two world wars included the approving words: ‘with absolute disregard for his own safety’.

The currency in which a notable warrior has been rewarded in modern times is, of course, an intrinsically worthless disc or cross of metal, which society has successfully promoted as desirable. The United States and Britain have customarily awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Victoria Cross – both mid-nineteenth-century creations – for single acts of bravery, episodes which lasted only a matter of minutes. Remarkably few of these supreme national tokens have been given for displays of courage sustained over months or years, such as were demanded as a commonplace from soldiers of earlier centuries. Indeed, the first VC was awarded for an act many people would consider a mere impulsive gesture of self-preservation: during the Crimean War a British sailor picked up a live shell which landed on the deck of his ship, and threw it overboard. In a rash moment, Congress once awarded its Medal of Honor to every member of a Civil War regiment, until wiser counsels prevailed and this largesse was retracted.

A friend who served as an infantry officer in Italy in the Second World War once observed to me that when one is twenty years old, the prospect of a ‘gong’ can incite some men to remarkable exertions. The possibility of recognition through medals has prompted many warriors to try harder, and thus caused battles to be won. The warrior’s cliché is correct, that ‘the only one who knows what a medal is worth is the man who won it’. All veterans perceive a distinction between a ‘good’ Silver Star or DSO or Croix de Guerre – gained for courage and leadership – and the other kind which ‘comes up with the rations’, not infrequently as a gesture to a career officer with influential connections. The courage of General George Patton was undisputed, but posterity is entitled to recoil from the shamelessness with which in both world wars he solicited medals from friends in high places – and received them. Likewise, I recall the rancour of an RAF veteran as he described his 1943 squadron commander. Many aircrew considered this officer a coward. He relaxed sufficiently one night in the mess to avow without embarrassment: ‘I am a career airman. I intend to survive the war.’ So he did, taking considerable care of his own safety. But the fellowship of the RAF hierarchy ensured that he got his ‘gong’ when he relinquished his squadron. Few people whom the wing-commander met in later life can have possessed any notion how relatively easily his DSO was earned. In the eyes of a new generation ignorant of the nuances of the warrior culture, the mere fact of an officer’s operational service admitted him to the ranks of ‘war heroes’.

One of the more notable follies committed during the premiership of John Major was his 1994 ‘reform’ of military decorations. Historically, only the Victoria Cross was open to all ranks. Commissioned officers and private soldiers were otherwise eligible for separate awards. Major’s new approach reflected a drowning politician’s quest for populist favour by introducing so-called ‘classless’ medals. His policy ignored the reality recognised by every fighting soldier: qualities demanded of officers and men on the battlefield are equally precious, but different in kind. Many British rankers who held the Distinguished Conduct Medal or Military Medal, abolished in the Major reforms, were dismayed. Here was a civilian politician who had never borne arms, trampling clumsily upon the recognition of battlefield achievement, and thoroughly upsetting those ‘at the sharp end’.

Many decorations are awarded for spectacular acts of courage. But others are issued cynically, because commanders deem it morally necessary to console a vanquished army, or to inspire men to try harder by giving awards for feats which are, in truth, no more than many of their comrades perform. For instance, some wartime heavy bomber pilots were decorated – several posthumously – for efforts to keep crippled aircraft aloft at the risk of their own lives, enabling the rest of their crews to bale out. This was a relatively commonplace manifestation of courage, but it was rewarded with decorations, to encourage emulation.

Official recognition of warriors’ deeds is often arbitrary, not least because it requires the survival of credible witnesses, almost invariably officers, to submit citations. Here we are back to Brown on Resolution. Every army in modern times has operated a more or less crude rationing system in apportioning decorations between units. This creates injustices both of omission and commission, well understood by fighting men. Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, who famously despised soldiers and sailors, once scornfully rehearsed to me the extravagant list of ‘gongs’ awarded after the Royal Navy’s bloody 1918 raid on the German submarine base at Zeebrugge, to make survivors feel better. If warriors cannot always be successful, their commanders find it expedient at least to convince them that some of their number have been brave enough to sustain collective honour.

What makes some warriors perform exceptional deeds? Charles Wilson, Churchill’s personal doctor during his premiership, served in France as an army doctor in the First World War, and afterwards wrote The Anatomy of Courage. Wilson, who became Lord Moran, rejected the view that courage is simply a quality possessed by some men and not by others. Nor, he argued, is it a constant, like income; rather, it is a capital sum of which each man possesses a variable amount. In all cases, such capital is eventually exhausted. There seems considerable evidence to support Moran’s thesis. In World War II, it was accepted that most fighting units advanced from amateur status in their first actions to much greater professionalism after some battle experience; thereafter, however, among the Western Allies at least, the aggressiveness and usefulness of a given formation declined, as it became not ‘battle-hardened’ – an absurd cliché - but tired and wary of risk. A veteran of Normandy once observed to me: ‘You fight a damn sight better when you don’t know where it hurts.’ In other words, the less battle-experienced soldier, the novice, sometimes performs feats from which a veteran would flinch.

The tales recounted in this book are designed to reflect a variety of manifestations of leadership, courage, heroic folly and the warrior ethic. Some are romantic, others painfully melancholy. Some of those portrayed were notably successful in their undertakings. Others were not. I am fascinated by warriors, but try to perceive their triumphs and tragedies without illusion. A touch of scepticism does these remarkable men – and two women – no disservice, nor does an acknowledgement that few were people with whom one would care to share a desert island. My subjects represent a range of nationalities, but are chiefly Anglo-Saxon, for this is my own culture. Three rose to lead large forces, most did not. This is a study of fighters, not commanders.

When I began writing, I intended to include figures as far back in history as the periods of Leonidas, Hannibal, Saladin. Yet sifting the evidence about such people, I came to believe that it was too doubtful and fragmentary to form a basis for convincing character studies. The distinguished historian of the Hundred Years War Jonathan Sumption notes that Walter Mannay, one of the foremost among King Edward Ill’s knights, paid Froissart cash for a fulsome testimonial in his Chronicles. The historical evidence about the stand of the Spartans at Thermopylae may be summarised thus: Leonidas probably existed, and probably died in a battle there. That is all, and not enough for the book which I wanted to write.

My own stories are confined, therefore, to modern times, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They concern characters about whom we know enough to construct credible and, I hope, entertaining portraits. The selection is whimsical. The range of personalities is designed to illustrate different aspects of the experience of war on land, at sea and in the air over the past two centuries. Several are national icons, while others have lost their lustre, and fallen into an obscurity from which 1 hope this book will help to rescue them. Some may seem unsympathetic, and some were failures. The characters and fates of warriors are as diverse as those of people who follow any other calling.

Most of these tales concern soldiers, but I have included one remarkable sailor, and two airmen who seem archetypes of the twentieth-century warrior. My collection – which of course is only a modest assay of a seam overflowing with riches – also favours those who left behind autobiographies, diaries or other writings, that provide insights into their thoughts as well as their deeds. The balance is thus unjustly loaded towards officers at the expense of those whom they commanded, and towards the articulate at the expense of the illiterate, not all of the latter members of the Brigade of Guards. Aficionados of naval history may justly complain that seamen are under-represented, but this is a portrait of human behaviour rather than a historical narrative balanced between the three dimensions of modern warfare.

If successful warriors have often been vain and uncultured men, their nations in hours of need have had cause to be profoundly grateful for their virtues, even if they have sometimes been injured by their excesses. Today, we recognise that other forms of courage are as worthy of respect as that which is shown on the battlefield. But this should not cause us to steal from the legends of former times their due as pillars of history. How far have we come, how sadly has Britain changed, when the Mayor of London proposes the removal from their plinths in Trafalgar Square of statues of British military commanders! He declares that prowess in war, especially colonial war, is no longer a fitting object for admiration. True, it is a strange quirk of fate that causes bronze images of two of the less admirable military leaders in British history, Earl Haig and the Duke of Cambridge, to dominate Whitehall. Yet it seems grotesque to seek to erase from our consciousness, in a shamelessly Stalinist spirit, a great military heritage.

This book is designed to amuse as much as to inform. I hope it will divert readers with its tales of the gallant and the picaresque. For all his social limitations and professional follies, the warrior is willing to risk everything on the field of battle, and sometimes to lose it, for purposes sometimes selfish or mistaken, but often noble.

MAX HASTINGS

Hungerford, England and Il Pinquan, Kenya

November 2004

1 Bonaparte’s Blessed Fool

THE WARS OF NAPOLEON produced a flowering of memoirs, both English and French, of extraordinary quality. Each writer’s work reflects in full measure his national characteristics. None but a Frenchman, surely, could have written the following lines about his experience of conflict: ‘I may, I think, say without boasting that nature has allotted to me a fair share of courage; I will add that there was a time when I enjoyed being in danger, as my thirteen wounds and some distinguished services prove, I think, sufficiently.’ Baron Marcellin de Marbot was the model for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional Brigadier Gerard: brave, swashbuckling, incapable of introspection, glorying without inhibition in the experience of campaigning from Portugal to Russia in the service of his emperor. Marbot was the most eager of warriors, who shared with many of his French contemporaries a belief that there could be no higher calling than to follow Bonaparte to glory. Few modern readers could fail to respect the courage of a soldier who so often faced the fire of the enemy, through an active service career spanning more than forty years. And no Anglo-Saxon could withhold laughter at the peacock vanity and chauvinism of the hussar’s account of the experience, rich in anecdotage and comedy, the latter often unintended.

Jean-Baptiste-Antoine-Marcellin de Marbot was born in 1782 at Beaulieu in the Corrèze, son of a country gentleman of liberal inclinations who became a general in France’s revolutionary army. With his round face and snub nose, the child Marcellin was known to his family as ‘the kitten’, and for some years during the nation’s revolutionary disorders attended a local girls’ school. He was originally destined for a naval career, but a friend urged his father that life aboard a warship mouldering in some seaport under British blockade was no prospect for an ambitious youth. Instead, in 1799 a vacancy was procured for him in the hussars. The seventeen-year-old boy was delighted, and from the outset gloried in his new uniform. His father, however, was uneasy about his shyness, and for some time was prone to refer to his son in company as ‘Mademoiselle Marcellin’ – rich pickings there for a modern psychologist. In those days when every hussar was expected to display a moustache as part of his service dress, the beardless teenager at first painted whiskers on his face.

Marbot met Bonaparte for the first time when accompanying his father to take up a posting with the army in Italy. They were amazed to encounter the hero of the Pyramids at Lyons, on his way back to Paris from Egypt, having abandoned his army to seek a throne, a quest to which General Marbot, a committed republican, declined to give his assistance. In Italy, young Marcellin won his spurs. Despatched with a patrol to seize Austrian prisoners, the sergeant in command professed sudden illness. The boy seized the opportunity and assumed leadership of the troop: ‘When…I took command of the fifty men who had come under my orders in such unusual circumstances, a mere trooper as I was and seventeen years old, I resolved to show my comrades that if I had not yet much experience or military talent, I at least possessed pluck. So I resolutely put myself at their head and marched on in what we knew was the direction of the enemy.’

Marbot’s patrol surprised an Austrian unit, took the necessary prisoners, and returned in triumph to the French lines where their self-appointed commander was rewarded with promotion to sergeant, followed soon afterwards by a commission. He survived the terrible siege of Genoa, where his father died in his arms following a wound received on the battlefield. Soon afterwards the young man was posted to the 25th Chasseurs. In 1801 he was appointed an aide-de-camp to that hoary old hero Marshal Augereau, with whom he travelled for the first time to the Iberian Peninsula.

By 1805, already a veteran, Marbot was an eager young officer with Bonaparte’s Grand Army, ready for a summer of campaigning against the Austrians and Russians. ‘I had three excellent horses,’ he enthused, adding bathetically, ‘and a servant of moderate quality.’ The duties of aides-de-camp were among the most perilous in any army of the time. It was their business to convey their masters’ wishes and tidings not only across the battlefield, but from end to end of Europe, often in the teeth of the enemy. In the period that followed, writes Marbot, ‘constantly sent from north to south, and from south to north, wherever there was fighting going on, I did not pass one of these ten years without coming under fire, or without shedding my blood on the soil of some part of Europe.’ It is striking to notice that, until the twentieth century, every enthusiastic warrior regarded it as a mark of virility to have been wounded in action, if possible frequently. A soldier who avoided shedding his own blood, far from being congratulated on luck and skill, was more likely to be suspected of shyness.

Marbot began the 1805 campaigning season by carrying despatches from the emperor to Marshal Masséna in Italy, through the Alpine passes. Then he took his place beside Augereau for what became the Austerlitz campaign. ‘Never had France possessed an army so well-trained,’ he exulted, ‘of such good material, so eager for fighting and fame…Bonaparte…accepted the war with joy, so certain was he of victory…He knew how the chivalrous spirit of Frenchmen has in all ages been influenced by the enthusiasm of military glory.’ Seldom has there been an era of warfare in which officers and soldiers alike strove so ardently for distinction. If there were young blades in Bonaparte’s army who confined themselves to doing their duty, history knows nothing of them. In the world of France’s marshals and their subordinates, there was a relentless contest for each to outdo the others in braving peril with insouciance. Its spirit was supremely captured by the tale of Ney, after the battle of Lutzen, encountering the emperor. ‘My dear cousin! But you are covered in blood!’ exclaimed Bonaparte in alarm. ‘It isn’t mine, Sire,’ responded the marshal complacently, ‘except where that damned bullet passed through my leg!’

Having survived the carnage at Austerlitz, Marbot found himself among a throng of French officers sitting their horses around Bonaparte on the day after the battle, gazing out on the broken ice of the Satschan Lake, strewn with debris and corpses. Amidst it all, a hundred yards from the shore they beheld a Russian sergeant, shot through the thigh and clinging to an ice floe deeply stained with his blood. The wounded man, spying the glittering assembly, raised himself and cried out in Russian, ‘All men become brothers once battle is done.’ He begged his life from the emperor of the French. The entreaty was translated. Bonaparte, in a characteristic impulse of imperial condescension, told his entourage to do whatever was necessary to save the Russian. A handful of men plunged into the icy water, seized floating baulks of timber, and sought to paddle themselves out to the floe. Within seconds they became clumsy prisoners of their frozen clothing. They abandoned efforts to save the enemy soldier, and struggled ashore to save themselves.

Marbot, a spectator, declared that their error had been to brave the water fully clad. Bonaparte nodded assent. The would-be rescuers had shown more zeal than discretion, observed the emperor dryly. The hussar now felt obliged to put his own counsel into practice. Leaping from his horse, he tore off his clothes and sprang into the lake. He acknowledged the shock of the deadly cold, but ‘the emperor’s presence encouraged me, and I struck out towards the Russian sergeant. At the same time my example, and probably the praise given me by the emperor, determined a lieutenant of artillery…to imitate me.’ As he struggled painfully amid the great daggers of ice, Marbot was dismayed to find his rival catching him up. Yet he was obliged to admit that alone, he could never have succeeded in his attempt. Together, and with immense labour, the two Frenchmen pushed the wounded Russian on his crumbling floe towards the shore, battering a path through the jumble of ice before them. At last they came close enough for onlookers to throw out lifelines. The two swimmers seized the ropes and passed them around the wounded man, enabling him to be dragged to safety. They themselves, at their last gasp, bleeding and torn, staggered ashore to receive their laurels. Bonaparte called his mameluke Roustan to bring them a glass of rum apiece. He gave gold to the wounded soldier, who proved to be Lithuanian. Once recovered, the man became a devoted follower of the emperor, a sergeant in his Polish lancers. Marbot’s companion in mercy, the lieutenant of artillery, was so weakened by his experience that after months in hospital, Marbot recorded pityingly that he had to be invalided out of the service. The hussar, of course, was back on duty next day.